sense of confidence and well-being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life. Scientific technology has made life more secure in many ways, but its destructive side, most dramatically revealed by the development of nuclear weapons, adds to the feeling of insecurity that derives from the individual's diminishing control over his immediate surroundings. The "shallowness and lostness of modern man" cannot be dismissed as a nightmare dreamed up by intellectuals, as Cox put it, in an "orgy of ritual self-laceration." The structure of modern experience gives little encouragement to the belief that we live in a benign universe. It gives far more encouragement to a sense of helplessness, victimization, cynicism, and despair; and even the myth of progress, which for a long time provided a substitute for religious faith, has now lost much of its plausibility. For millions of people, the expectation of a better world—even if it is only the expectation of a greater supply of material possessions—is no longer experienced as a daily reality.

Social theories derived from the Enlightenment, which assume that scientific mastery over nature ought to "exorcise" fear and awe and thus to make people feel more secure, cannot explain why so many of them feel more insecure than ever and find it tempting, therefore, to think of themselves as helpless victims of circumstances. Nor can such theories explain why the most effective resistance to the prevailing sense of helplessness, in recent years, has come from the very people having the best reason of all to identify themselves as victims, namely the black people of the South, oppressed first by slavery and then by peonage, political disfranchisement, and a vicious system of racial segregation. Culturally backward by Cox's enlightened standards, Southern blacks lived in a culture full of "tribal residues"; yet they showed more confidence in the

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